Monday, November 13, 2017

There, he said it. He said what most of them are thinking.
He identified your problem and offered a solution.

Your problem is that you have not been sufficiently
brainwashed. So said Gov. Moonbeam himself, Gov. Jerry Brown of the People’s
Republic of California. (Politico, via Watts Up via Maggie’s Farm)

Because, Jerry knows best. He knows things that you do not
know and that you cannot imagine. He knows how bad it really, really is. Your pedestrian imagination flounders when
faced with such a grandiose vision of human destitution and desolation, of a
world where every last living thing, down to the most miniscule bacterium will
be erased and eradicated. Your imagination, however capacious you think it is,
cannot grasp the scale of the calamity.

On his way to the climate talks in Bonn, Gov. Moonbeam
stopped off at the Vatican. Now being led by an Argentinian, the Vatican has
become far friendlier to crackpot theories, especially anti-American ones.
Whether this has anything to do with Argentina or with the fact that the pope
underwent psychoanalysis, I leave to your imagination.

Politico sets the scene:

On his
way to the United Nations climate talks in Bonn, Germany, this week, Jerry
Brown stopped over at the Vatican, where a doleful group of climate scientists,
politicians and public health officials had convened to discuss calamities that
might befall a warming world. The prospects were so dire—floods and fires, but
also forced migration, famine and war—that some of the participants
acknowledged difficulty staving off despair.

The word “apocalyptic” does not quite do it justice. At
least in the Biblical narrative, the New Jerusalem descends on the purified world. In the new leftist world of deep and serious thinking, nothing good
comes about.

One needs to mention that this represents the last
throes of an all-out assault on capitalism and free enterprise and the
Industrial Revolution. Beginning with the famed Luddites the Western world has always
had a coterie of haters, people who believed that economic progress was going
to destroy your soul. In its place they proposed economic stagnation, because
capitalism was evil and its gains ill-gotten. They knew, as you don't, that the hand of divine justice would destroy everything that the venal capitalists had built. But it would not
stop there. It would destroy the rest of the world.

In the Vatican Jerry Brown was in his element. He seized the
occasion:

California’s
doomsayer governor did not express much optimism either. Seated between an
economist and an Argentine bishop at the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, Brown
leaned into his microphone and said, “It is despairing. Ending the world,
ending all mammalian life. This is bad stuff.”

Next thing you know Gov. Brown will be standing in Times
Square holding up a sign that reads: The End is Nigh.

And yet, Brown clings to one last thread of hope. He sees no
cause for optimism, but he still believes that something can be done… like
banning fossil fuels and raising taxes to the point where the vast majority of
people in California will starve. Happily for Brown, nearly the majority of
people in his state do not speak English at home. One trusts that he belongs to
the Barack Obama, Angela Merkel open-borders school of immigration policy, the one that
believes that we can do penance for our capitalistic sins by welcoming more and
more people who reject our values and who will vote the way Brown wants them to vote.

Brown continues:

“There’s
nothing that I see out there that gives me any ground for optimism,” he went
on. Still, he promised action: “I’m extremely excited about doing something
about it."

Being a patriot, Brown is showing off his own rejection of the
last presidential election by traveling around the world pretending that he is
the president, or, shall we say, a shadow president in an alternative nation. Didn’t
Victor Davis Hanson once call it: Mexifornia?

Crusading
across Europe in his Fitbit and his dark, boxy suit, Brown advances California
and its policies almost as an alternative to the United States—and his waning
governorship, after a lifetime in politics, as a quixotic rejection of the
provincial limits of the American governor. In the growing chasm between
Trump’s Washington and California—principally on climate change, but also
taxes, health care, gun control and immigration—Brown is functioning as the
head of something closer to a country than a state.

In his
final term, Brown has lobbied other states and regions to reduce their
greenhouse gas emissions, while augmenting California’s already expansive suite
of climate change programs. But Trump’s election—and the specter of Brown’s own
retirement—have lately set the governor on a tear. In a rush of climate
diplomacy this year, Brown traveled to China to meet with President Xi Jinping,
then to Russia to participate in an international economic forum. This past
week saw him address lawmakers in Brussels and Stuttgart, Germany, and he was
preparing for roundtable meetings with scientists in Oslo before arriving in
Bonn for a climate conference, where Brown will serve as special adviser for
states and regions. And he is preparing for California to host an international
climate summit of its own next year in San Francisco.

While Obamaphile politicians whine about Donald Trump’s
supposed lack of patriotism, Brown pretends that he no longer belongs to the
great American nation. He is running his own foreign policy. Patriotism does
not do it justice:

He [Brown]
was still talking about the need for a fundamental shift in lifestyle when he
said at the Vatican that confronting climate change will require “a
transformation of the relationship of human beings to all the mysterious
network of things.”

“It’s
not just a light rinse,” Brown said. “We need a total, I might say, brainwashing.
We need to wash our brains out and see a very different kind of world.”

Happily for us, we have the Jerry Browns of this world to
keep us apprised of what is happening in the mysterious network of things. It
sounds like he has taken a page from an earlier and greater opponent of the “dark
Satanic Mills” of industrialization. Brown talks like someone who has been
stuck in a time warp, sitting in class and reading William Blake. Didn’t Blake
write:

If the
doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is,
Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow
chinks of his cavern.

The more important part is the wish to brainwash everyone.
After all, that is what it’s all about. The new Resistance, the one that is
still fighting the Nazis in the fields of France, believes, as an article of
faith, that those who voted for Donald Trump had been influenced, tricked,
cajoled, nudged or pushed by those meddling Russians. No one in his right mind
could have voted for Trump, so Trump voters were not in their right minds. It echoes the sentiment of one Thomas Frank. Didn't Frank write a book where he suggested that the people of Kansas did not know what was good for them and were voting against their best interests. It would not take any great leap to suggest that Frank knew better and that in a true democracy we could ignore their votes and allow their betters, like Frank, to decide for them. If that did not work, we would have to try a little brainwashing.

After
all, totalitarian democracies do not need to have elections. The Party knows
what is best for you. The Party can read the general will of the people. If you
think otherwise, you have been indoctrinated by the great capitalist propaganda
machine. Nowadays it is begin led by the Russians who have been meddling in our elections. Doesn't that mean that the Russians control your minds and are forcing you to do what is not in the best interest of Jerry Brown and Thomas Frank? To overcome the terrible things that Russia is doing to your mind, Jerry Brown proposes a good brainwashing.

Good to know where he stands. Good to know that you either
agree with Gov. Moonbeam or you are guilty of thought crimes.

It is confusing to call for positive brainwashing, even as "truthful hyperbole" or whatever we're calling such things now.

I heard on the radio today that 82% of Minnesotans are hopeful about the future. There is a small rural/urban divide, 73% hopeful outside of the metro area, and 89% in the metro. Also blacks and minorities are generally more hopeful than whites, perhaps coming from high church attendance as kids.http://newsessay.com/2017/11/13/morning-edition-november-13-at-4-am-part-11

Whether the self-esteem or selfie movement are working their magic, I can't tell, but collectively we seem to be into brain-washed collectivism in the tundra lands of Minnesota. I don't get it myself, but perhaps we're hoping some of that global warming weaken the grip of winter? 5 months of below freezing temperatures is too long.

Or how about the 6th great extinction? It's hard to visualize anything that is planet-scaled, unless you use something the size of another planet ramming us. At least I can understand why Stephen Hawkins is worried about living on Earth, but not Mars.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction